


Forever Love

by The_Pugnisher



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Original Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6574528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Pugnisher/pseuds/The_Pugnisher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two lovers have found a way to make love last more than a lifetime, but is the price worth it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forever Love

**Author's Note:**

> This is a one shot I wrote for a friend when I was finding it hard to concentrate on the other story I was working on. I hope you enjoy!

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” she said quietly. She sat at the vanity with her back to him, but she used the reflection of the mirror to meet his eyes. Her eyes were sad, and filmed with moisture. He thought they looked like green stars from the light they caught from the bulbs above the mirror. She had no makeup on, she never did, but she still looked beautiful. The slight webbing of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the fine lines from laughter around her mouth were the only true signs that age had started to take its toll. He wondered, briefly, if she really had passed her fortieth birthday a few years back, but he knew very well that she had.

“What do you mean?” he asked lightly. He sat on the bed watching her as she wrote in her journal, as he did almost every evening before bed. He liked watching her as the words slipped from her mind onto the paper, especially when she wore her fitted night dresses. He felt there was something revealing in the way her brow creased in concentration, and the way her body bent to draw her closer to the page.

“This,” she answered simply. She sat the pen down atop her writing, and with both of her thin, soft hands she gestured out encompassing everything with her spread fingers. She spun on the well-oiled stool to face him directly, her hands and fingers still splayed, and a look on her face that read ‘isn’t it obvious?’.

“You know the deal,” he tried, but she cut him off with a shake of her head that flounced her dark, wavy hair like a halo.

“Yes, and that is why I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

He studied her. Her hands dropped to her lap as she awaited his response, but he did not know what to say. Several times he opened his mouth to ask a question or make a statement, and just as many times he closed it. The old adage ‘better to look a fool than to open your mouth and prove it’ rattled around his head. Finally, he asked “Is it because I’m younger than you?”

She laughed. Her eyes shut, her lips parted, and the lines around her face highlighted themselves. She clapped her hands together in merriment, but then raised them to her lips as if embarrassed. Her head tilted demurely over her fingertips, as if she could capture the last few moments between her fingers forever or erase them entirely like chalk from a blackboard. She remained as beautiful as ever. At least he could still make her laugh, even if she were not happy all around.

“Age has nothing to do with this,” she started, but he cut her off this time.

“Because eventually, I’ll be older than you.”

“Seriously, it has nothing to do with age. Any woman would be glad to have a guy half her age in her bed,” she answered. She blinked her large green eyes, broke eye contact, and looked at the ground away from his thin, handsome face. He watched her for a moment, and recognized that she had closed up. She did that every now and then; she would start a conversation, realize the futility of it, and then let it fade away.

“Then, what is it about?” he pressed on, for her sake. He loved her; he could not let her slip back into herself, not if they wanted to move past whatever they were into. She blushed and grimaced at the same time. He watched the emotions war behind her expressive eyes. He studied the tremble and struggle of her lips. He scrutinized the furrow that formed between her brows. Every expression she made he devoured trying to piece together how she felt.

“I’ve raised you to love me,” she finally answered.

“I know. And, when you die and are reborn, I’ll raise you to love me. That’s the way this works,” he explained with a wry smile on his lips –a smile that asked ‘what could possibly make more sense?’.

“That’s what I can’t do anymore,” she snapped. Her soft features hardened. She looked like a child that played with a square peg, but could not get it to go into the round hole; angry, confused, and hurt. She looked back up into his eyes and her face softened at the look he gave her.

“I don’t understand,” he said quietly. He tried not to prod her too much, but he wanted to know what was on her mind.

“It’s not right,” she said evenly, “What we do isn’t right.”

They sat across from each other, she in her night dress and him still in his slacks, button up, and vest. They studied each other’s faces. Each hoped that the other would understand how they felt on the topic, but neither willing to give ground. Finally, he broke the silence,

“It’s the price we pay to be together forever. We raise the other, we die, and then we are raised.”

“Yes, but what if I don’t want to be here forever.”

“Well, we can go anywhere. As long as we are together, we can go anywhere. The spell only binds our souls to each other, not to this house,” he explained. He tried, desperately, to keep her from continuing. He couldn’t imagine life without her.

“I know how the spell works. I taught you about it, remember?” She asked bitterly. Her green eyes were no longer just moist; tears slid from the corners and down her cheeks. She pushed a hand up to her cheek and rubbed a tear roughly from her cheek.

“Why are you talking like this all of a sudden?” he asked with tears threatening his own dark eyes.  
She spun on the little stool back to the vanity, and hid her face in her hands. Ragged breaths rattled from her lips, and her shoulders shook from the effort of holding back sobs. He lifted up from his spot on the bed and moved to stand behind her. He placed a hand on her shoulder. Moments later a hand slipped from her face to land lightly atop his hand; a gesture of affection and thankfulness. Then the hand pulled away and dropped to the journal on the desk. She pushed the pen away, flipped the pages back, slipped her finger in to hold a specific place when she closed it, and then lifted it up over her shoulder to hand it to him.

He opened the journal and read where she had indicated. Several minutes passed with silence and breathing as the symphony that played to the scene of his breaking heart.

“It isn’t all of a sudden,” she answered his earlier question. She breathed, managed to wipe away another tear, then looked up into the vanity mirror to search for his gaze. Once their eyes met, she continued, “I’ve felt like this for years.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked, but she could see in his eyes that it made no sense to him. He acted mature and dashing, so she often forgot that he was only twenty. She bit her lip, then tried to voice her feelings, “We have died countless times and raised each other all over again in the name of love.”

“Yes,” he cut in, “because that is what love is; sacrifice and determination.”  
She shook her head in denial. She refused to listen to his words.

“You’re wrong. Love isn’t this. Love is… free and wild,” she flapped her hands trying to demonstrate, but realized it only made her look foolish. She blushed again, but she needed to get this out. She tried again, “If this was real love we wouldn’t have tied ourselves together. We would have… figured out a way to bring ourselves back… at the same time… to see if we fell in love all over again. That would show true love; finding each other against all hope and logic. Not this. This is a perversion.”

He leaned forward, over her shoulder, and dropped the thick, leather bound diary back on the desk. He turned and moved back toward the bed. His hands slipped up to the buttons on his vest to start removing them.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he answered. His voice sounded flat, even to his own ears.

“That’s not all I feel,” she said. He stopped unbuttoning his vest, and turned to look at her. She continued, growing bolder with every word she spoke, “How do I know that I’m the same person? I’ve read my diary. All of my past selves write, and I feel like I know them. But does that make me them?”

“What do you mean? Of course you are the same person, I can see it. You never change in my journal. You are exactly the same person.”

“None of my past selves ever wrote about feeling this,” she countered. She put her hand down on the book and brushed its soft exterior. “They never wrote about questioning their choices, never wrote about wanting to end the spell. They all thought that this was the perfect way to live and to love. If I don’t feel that way, then I can’t be the same person.”

“You and I, we could still end this trap. We could break the spell together. I know we can,” he said softly almost like a plea. He went back to work on the vest, then removed it.

“I don’t think I want to do this anymore. Please, let’s break this. Let us live out this life, and then let it end,” she whispered. She looked in the mirror at him. Her green eyes were big and round and beautiful. He looked away, and blinked away tears.

“You really are the same person,” he said solemnly.

“Why do you keep saying that?” she pressed. He could see on her face that she felt different; broken from all of her past selves. He pointed at the journal, and motioned at it. The pages flew open to a passage written over a century ago. She read the passage, read it again, then read it a third time. The furrow between her brows deepened each time she went through the passage, “I don’t understand. I’ve read this over and over. I know every single word of this book. I have never seen this passage before. ‘I want to tell him that this spell isn’t a description of love, but a description of prison’. Where did this come from?”

“That’s only one of thousands,” he said offhandedly as he removed his shirt, and then moved to remove his belt. “I thought that if I changed your journal, that maybe those thoughts would leave. It turns out our spell works perfectly at keeping us the same as always.”

“You put a spell on my journal to change the entries?” she asked shocked and hurt. She bent over the diary, and started poring over it.

“Every time you came back you would start off so sweet, but then you would raise me,” he said quietly. He walked up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder. He breathed a sigh, and continued, “You would raise me, and then you would be right back where you left off. Angry and wanting to break the spell.”

“Then why haven’t we?” she asked, her eyes still glued to the pages.

“Because you always die,” he answered. It happened quickly, one moment she felt comforted by his presence, and the next he had the belt wrapped around her throat and pulled tight. Her hands went straight to the belt trying to work her fingers between skin and the leather. Their eyes met for a moment. He could see her questioning, her panic, her pain, and he liked it –just as his own journal always said he did. She bucked and struggled, and he rode out her movements with precision like a rodeo cowboy. He watched as she gave up trying to find purchase on the belt and went for his hands, but he had slipped the belt through the buckle before pushing it over her head; he held on to the tail end with his hands far out of reach. He thought that any moment now she would quiet down and slump to the ground, but she lurched forward her hands splaying wide on the desk to brace herself. She nearly smashed her head into the mirror. He staggered forward from the sudden movement, but he kept her from breaking the mirror with her head with his hold on the belt.

She stilled. He watched the strength ebb from her shoulders, the twitching grow more erratic, and the skin turn purple. He huffed and puffed as he struggled to hold on, but he knew they were close. Then she twisted in her chair, and things went sideways. She had stilled to focus her mind. The twitching she suffered was not erratic, but planned as he tried to force her feet under her. She turned and flung herself at him, but the pen she grabbed from the vanity’s bureau top led the way; it sank deep into his throat.

He let go of the belt and fell back. He slumped down at the foot of the bed, his fingers and hands wrapped around the pen still lodged in his throat. Blood pooled around the wound, warmed his fingers and chest, and made him turn pale. Then she was in his face. She tore his hands away, and placed her own on the wound. She had managed to remove the belt, but, instead of leaving him, she turned to help him. He almost could not believe it, but he knew that she still loved him even if she wanted to break the spell.

“Listen to me,” she rasped. He could barely hear her over the pounding of blood in his ears. He wondered if he were drowning in blood. She pressed harder on his neck, and his eyes widened then focused on her. She continued, “Help me break the spell. Then, I will heal you.”

He might be dying, but he was not that stupid. She would leave him. He knew it.

“Liar,” he gulped. Pain wracked his body. She pressed harder.

“You think that you will come back from this, but let me promise you this: If you do not release me from this spell I will spend the rest of my life killing you as an infant. Over and over I will kill you until we both die and are born again as infants and we can’t raise each other in magic, so we’ll be as good as useless. If you release us, I will heal you.”

“Swear,” He barked, and the pain nearly made him pass out. The room was growing dark. Very dark.

“Fine,” she answered. When next she spoke her words appeared in the air behind her as if etched in burning blue fire into the very fabric of reality, “I swear that once the spell is release, I will heal you to the best of my ability.”

The burning letters flashed, then disappeared and he knew she had sworn upon her own existence. If she broke the oath then her next rebirth would be one of eternal torment.

As when they first cast the spell, she fueled it. She might not be as intricate or expansive with her casting abilities, but she had bounds of power. She easily out classed him in the waiting game, and the spell to break the soul-sewing spell they had created centuries ago required a lot of power. He focused everything he had on weaving the spell, but it was hard. The dark spots swayed in front of his eyes. Then he felt a little of her magic enter into him to give him strength. He realized how determined she was if she would heal him even before casting the spell. She knew she could not do this without him, so it was now or never.

He finished weaving the spell, and then he attached it to her strength.

No great explosion. No sparks or fanfare. The breaking of the spell was signaled simply by a  
feeling of emptiness within both of them, as if their soul occupied a sock worn out by someone with too big of a foot.

She fell back, and wiped her brow.

“Heal…me…” he croaked.

She nodded. She pulled the pen from his throat, and placed her palm against his neck. He felt warmth, and then nothing. Blood still gushed from his wound, his vision still darkened, and his life was slipping out of him.

“You promised,” he cried in shock.

“And I did as I had promised. I healed you as much as I could,” she answered and he knew her words to be true. He leaned back, and his eyes widened.

“Bitch,” he whispered.

“At least I knew who you really were before you died,” she replied. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, “I know why I never felt comfortable, now. Something inside knew what you were capable of.”


End file.
